POEMS OF THE ANIMAL77to survive in such a place, but in the sense that we derive our own
nature, our very being, from our interaction with other creatures.
Wilbur’s argument that in realizing our kinship with animals we
ought also to become aware of our moral obligation to allow them to live
and flourish is shared by many contemporary poets, and W. S. Merwin
is one of the greatest of these. His poem “For a Coming Extinction”
adopts the weary irony (“One must always pretend something / Among
the dying”) of a speaker speaking for all of humanity, addressing the gray
whale, whom “we are sending... to The End / That great god.”^44 The dis-
appearance of the whale will leave “behind it the future / Dead.” The
grim irony of the poem is that in the darkness of nonexistence, before
that great god, the whale will find an array of the already extinct, “the
irreplaceable hosts ranged countless.” While this is certainly an explic-
itly angry and didactic poem (the speaker tells the whale to tell the god
of the end “that it is we who are important”), it insists that we think of
animals as a community that is essentially besieged by our relentless
ambition. The more ambiguous poem “The Current” presents human
awareness of the natural world through a metaphor of hunters or bird-
watchers lulled into a daze, waiting in the marshes for so long that, “for-
getting that we are water... / weeds grow up through us.”^45 The animals
of the marsh current slide by, bringing the fleeting touch of eels and fish
and the wave of black flukes, which barely awaken the hunters. The cur-
rent is both the flow of life in the natural world and our own animal
being, which yearns for a connection to that animal life. Again, whales
here suggest extinction, and they too wave to our hearts as they disap-
pear “from the Lethe.”
Merwin’s rich poetry invokes awareness of specific animals, animal
species, and the animal in general. He is always alert to the complexity
and contingency of our thinking, that we are confined by our own pre-
judices, circumstances, time, and environment. And yet his poetry
strives to show the dense texture of our connections to the world and
the rich lives of other creatures. His recent poem “A Message to Po Chu-I”
is a wonderful example of a poem that is both explicitly committed to
environmental and animal causes and self-conscious about its own